He captured the lightnings of heaven, the waves of the ocean he tamed,—
And ever the wonder amazed him as one that awakes from a dream.
But under the streets and the markets, the banks and the temples of prayer,
Where humanity laboured and plotted, or loved with an instinct divine,
Deep down in the silence and gloom of the earth that had shrouded them there
Were the fossil remains of a skull and the bones of what once was a spine.
Enfolded in darkness forever, untouched by the changes above,
And mingled as clay with the clay which the hands of the ages had brought,
Were the hearts in whose furnace of anguish was smelted the gold of our love,
And the brains from whose twilight of instinct has risen the dawn of our thought.